Alveda King Quotes

Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.

There is nothing more American than peaceful protest.

When a person in a Russian prison decides to start speaking, to start speaking the truth - they start to reject oppression.

It is people's willingness to take personal risks and confront the powerful by daring to speak the truth, not the truth itself, that ultimately leads to change.

Speaking truth to power is never going to be easy.

They didn't begin telling the truth in the Soviet Union until after it collapsed, did they?

Telling the truth - telling thoughtful truths - should not be a revolutionary act. Speaking truths to power should not be sacrificial, but they are.

You know in democracy you can protest peacefully and I'm sure you know it will have at least some kind of impact. You need to raise your voice. If you can't do much, you know, but at least raise you voice. Raising your voice is something you need to do.

I think that for many of us, the years of the Civil Rights movements - Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy running for president in 1968 to end the war and so forth - these were defining moment in terms of trying to hold government accountable and have a level of responsibility and truth-telling.

What Martin Luther King is doing is disarming the black people of America of their God-given right and of their natural right.

But I suppose the most revolutionary act one can engage in is... to tell the truth.

I've always thought the most patriotic thing you could do in a democracy is to speak the truth as you see it. And that's what we're supposed to be about in America. Freedom of speech.

The students I've been with these twenty years are looking for a world where it becomes a little easier to love and a lot harder to hate, where learning nonviolence means that we dedicate our hearts, minds, time, and money to a commitment that the force of love, the force of truth, the force of justice, and the force of organized resistance to corrupt power are seen as sane and the force of fists, guns, armies, and bombs insane.

History, mythology, and folktales are filled with stories of people punished for saying the truth. Only the Fool, exempt from society's rules, is allowed to speak with complete freedom.

It is my conviction that there is no way to peace - peace is the way.

There is a magnificent new militancy within the Negro community all across this nation. And I welcome this as a marvelous development. The Negro of America is saying he's determined to be free and he is militant enough to stand up.

Martin Luther King has made the Negro in America unnatural.

I was like so many others passion-ately involved in trying to bring those truths to the world's attention. We did our very best to peacefully do that. The city, state, and federal governments did their very best to quell our efforts. They were used to using heavy-handed tactics to silence us.

There is a big disincentive to talk about the truth. I will speak the truth.

They're only words. You can't be afraid of words that speak the truth, even if it's an unpleasant truth.

In a free society, there comes a time when the truth - however hard it may be to hear, however impolitic it may seem to say - must be told.

At the meeting I argued that the state had given us no alternative to violence. I said it was wrong and immoral to subject our people to armed attacks by the state without offering them some kind of alternative. I mentioned again that people on their own had taken up arms. Violence would begin whether we initiated it or not. Would it not be better to guide this violence ourselves, according to principles where we saved lives by attacking symbols of oppression, and not people? If we did not take the lead now, I said, we would soon be latecomers and followers to a movement we did not control.

Actually, the world and America is upset and the only way to bring about a change is to upset it more.

For by his face straight shall you know his heart.

A riot is the language of the unheard.